MariaDB Completes Series C Funding Led by Alibaba Group, Finishing 2017 With $54M in Global Investment

Funding from Alibaba and European Investment Bank accelerates worldwide opportunity for MariaDB as the open source database standard

MENLO PARK, Calif. and HELSINKI – November 1, 2017 – MariaDB® Corporation, the company behind the fastest growing open source database, today announced that it raised $27 million in an investment led by Alibaba Group, with participation from existing investors Intel Capital, California Technology Ventures, Tesi, SmartFin Capital and Open Ocean. Combined with a recent $27 million investment from the European Investment Bank(EIB), this latest capital brings MariaDB’s total funding this year to $54 million. MariaDB will continue its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to deliver new solutions for the cloud and emerging use cases. MariaDB reaches more than 60 million developers worldwide through its inclusion in every major Linux distribution, as well as a growing presence in the world’s major cloud providers. The latest investments reflect the rising interest in MariaDB from every commercial region around the world.

“Companies around the world are standardizing on open source for modern application development,” said Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB Corporation. “From global banks to leading telecommunication companies, MariaDB is selected over proprietary offerings for its complete set of database features built for the next generation of applications. This investment allows MariaDB to further accelerate growth, while delivering new solutions for the cloud and automation through machine learning.”

MariaDB’s open source model and active community participation enable the company to iterate more quickly and add new industry-leading capabilities faster than closed, proprietary software vendors like Oracle. Technology giants Alibaba, Facebook, Tencent and others have collaborated with MariaDB to develop and incorporate significant features, including multi-source replication, encryption, point-in-time rollback and more that address new and emerging challenges and opportunities.

Alibaba Cloud is a valued MariaDB contributor and user. MariaDB and Alibaba Cloud companies have worked closely together to enhance features of products such as AliSQL, a cloud-friendly open source project that enables Alibaba’s work with MariaDB.

“MariaDB is becoming the gold standard for enterprise-grade open source databases,” said Jin Li, Vice President of Alibaba Cloud. “We believe that the symbiotic relationships found in the open source community contribute to the success of both MariaDB’s database technology and our cloud platform, and we have an opportunity to build some truly innovative solutions for cloud, on premise and hybrid deployments.”

MariaDB Empowers Mobility in the Cloud

With the widespread adoption of cloud architectures, comes increasing concern that cloud vendor lock-in brings the same lack of choice as proprietary systems. In contrast, MariaDB is deployment agnostic, free from cloud vendor lock-in and engineered to handle transactional, analytical, and web-scale workloads across any public, private or hybrid topology. MariaDB’s mobility affords customers unparalleled flexibility and power with a best-of-breed, open source database.

Record MariaDB Business Growth

Today’s global investment news comes on the heels of a momentous 2017 fiscal year, which ended September 30, with record business growth.

Rapid Revenue Expansion: MariaDB ended the fiscal year and last quarter with historical revenue gains. The average deal size doubled as customers deployed MariaDB across growing segments of their business, including the first enterprise-wide replacement and migration from Oracle Enterprise to MariaDB.

New Database Solution Offerings: In 2017, MariaDB continued its track record of innovative development through the availability of two new database solution offerings: MariaDB TX, a complete database solution for transactional workloads, and MariaDB AX, a modern data warehousing solution for high-performance analytics.

Debuted Inaugural MariaDB User Conference: In April, MariaDB hosted its first-ever annual user conference to address the fast growing business usage of MariaDB. With participation from hundreds of customers, partners and developers from around the world, the conference reflected MariaDB’s growing global presence in the enterprise.

As a general purpose database, MariaDB has been deployed to support a wide range of applications in every industry, from credit card transactions and investment applications in banking, to customer phone data and billing applications in telecom, to inventory, purchases and order fulfillment applications in e-commerce. With the ability to fulfill any transactional or analytical workload, MariaDB supports the most critical applications at companies around the world. Its widespread use across Linux distributions and cloud platforms, as well as its ease of use, have quickly made MariaDB the open source database standard for the modern enterprise.

MariaDB Corporation is the company behind MariaDB, the fastest growing Open Source database. MariaDB, with a strong history of community innovation and enterprise adoption, provides the most functionally complete open source database. MariaDB powers applications at companies including Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities and more.

MariaDB solutions are engineered to run on any infrastructure – bare metal servers, virtual machines, containers, public and private clouds – and is available in all leading Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, and is the default database in openSUSE, Manjaro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) / CentOS / Fedora, Arch Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Debian, with a reach of more than 60 million developers worldwide.